1
BETTY did not get down for breakfast in the morning. And Mrs. Boatwright
sent nothing up.
It was close upon noon when Betty, sketching portfolio under arm, came
slowly down the stairs. Mrs. Boatwright, at her desk in the front room,
glanced up, called:
“Oh, Betty--just a moment!”
The girl stood in the doorway. She looked so slim and small and, even,
childlike, that the older woman, to whom responsibility for all things
and persons about her was a habit, knit her heavy brows slightly. What
on earth were you to do with the child? What had Griggsby Doane been
thinking of in bringing her out here? Anything, almost, would have been
better. And just now, of all times!
“Would you mind coming in? There's a question or two I'd like to ask
you.”
Betty paused by a rocking chair of black walnut that was upholstered in
crimson plush; fingered the crimson fringe. Mrs. Boatwright was marking
out a geometrical pattern on the back of an envelope; frowning down at
it. The silence grew heavy.
Finally Mrs. Boatwright, never light of hand, rame out with:
“This Mr. Brachey--who is he?”
Betty's fringed lids moved swiftly up; dropped again. “He--he's a
writer, a journalist.”
“You knew him on the ship?”
“Yes.”
“You knew him pretty well?”
“I--saw something of him.”
“Do you know why he came out here?”
Betty was silent.
“Do you know?”
“I should think you would ask him.”
Mrs. Boatwright considered this. The girl was selfconscious, a little.
And quietly--very quietly--hostile. Or perhaps merely on the defensive.
“Then you do know?”
“No,” replied Betty, with that same very quiet gravity, “I can't say
that I do. He is studying China, of course. He came from America to do
that, I understand.”
“Did you know he was coming out here?”
Betty slowly shook her head.
“Have you been corresponding with him?”
Another silence. Then this from Betty, without heat:
“I don't understand why you are asking these questions.”
“Are you unwilling to answer them?”
“Such personal questions as that last one--yes.”
“Why?”
“You have no right to ask it.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Boatwright considered. “Hmm!” She controlled her temper and
framed her next remark with care. This slip of a girl was unexpectedly
in fiber like Griggsby Doane. There was no weakness in her quiet
resistance, no yielding. Perhaps she was strong, after all. Though she
looked soft enough; gentle like her mother. Perhaps, even, she was
a person, of herself. This was a new thought. Mrs. Boatwright drew a
parallelogram, then painstakingly shaded the lines.
“We mustn't misunderstand each other, Betty,” she said. “In your
father's absence, I am responsible for you. This man has appeared
rather mysteriously. His business is not clear. The tao-tai asked Mr.
Boatwright to look him up, for it seems he hasn't even an interpreter.
He has just been here. They've gone for an audience with the provincial
judge. Mr. Boatwright has asked him to come back here for tiffin. Which
was rather impulsive, I'm afraid....” She paused; started outlining
an octagon. “I may as well come out with it. Mr. Boatwright told me a
little of what happened last evening--”
“Of what happened But nothing--”
“If you please! Mr. Boatwright is not a particularly observant man
in these matters, but he couldn't help seeing that there is something
between you and this Mr. Brachey.... Now, since you see what is in my
mind, will you tell me why he is here?”
During this speech Betty stopped fingering the crimson fringe. She stood
motionless, holding the portfolio still against her side. A slow color
crept into her cheeks. She wouldn't, or couldn't, speak.
“Very well, if you won't answer that question, will you at least tell me
something of what you do know about him?”
“I know very little about him,” said Betty now, in a low but clear
voice, without emphasis.
“I must try to make you understand this, my dear. Here the man is.
Within the hour we are to sit down at tiffin with him. It is growing
clearer every minute that Mr. Boatwright's suspicion was correct--
“You have no right to use that word!”
“Well, then, his surmise, say. There _is_ something between you and this
man. Don't you think you'd better tell me what it is?”
“There is nothing--nothing at all--that I need tell you.”
“Is there nothing that you ought to tell your father?”
“You can not speak for him.”
“I stand in his place, while he's away It is a responsibility I must
accept. You say you know very little about the man?”
Betty bowed.
“You met him on the ship, by chance?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know any of his friends?”
“No.”
“Anything of his past?”
Betty hesitated. Then, as the woman glanced keenly up, she replied:
“Only what he has told me.”
“Do you know, even, whether he is a married man?”
Another long silence fell. Betty stood as quietly as before, looking out
of frank brown eyes at the sunlit courtyard and the gate house beyond
where old Sun Shao-i, seated on a stool, was having the inside of his
eyelids scraped by an itinerant barber.
“Yes,” Betty replied.
“You mean--?”
“I know that he _is_ married.”
2
Betty, as she threw out this bit of uncompromising truth, was stirred
with a thrill of wilder adventure than had hitherto entered her somewhat
untrammeled young life. The situation had outrun her experience; she was
acting on instinct. There was a sense of shock, too; and of hurt--hurt
that Mrs. Boatwright could look, feel, so forbidding. Her firm face,
now pressed together from chin to forehead, wrinkled across, squinting
unutterable suspicions, stirred a resistance in Betty's breast that for
a little time flared into anger.
There was no telling what Mrs. Boatwright felt. Her frown even relaxed,
after a moment. The outbreak of moral superiority that Betty looked for
didn't come. Instead she said:
“How did you learn this?”
“He told me.”
“Oh, he told you?”
“Well, he wrote a letter before he--went away.”
“Oh. he went away!”
“Yes. He went. Without a word. I didn't know where he was.”
“When was that?”
“When we landed at Shanghai.”
“Hardly three weeks ago. He's here now. Tell me--he wouldn't have gone
off like that, of course, leaving such an intimate letter, unless a
pretty definite situation had arisen.”
Betty was silent.
“Will you tell me what it was?”
“No.”
“Then--I really have a right to ask this of you--will you give me your
word not to see him until your father returns, and then not until you
have laid it before him?”
Silence again. The fringed lids fluttered. A small hand reached for the
crimson fringe, slim fingers clung there.
Betty's thoughts were running away. She felt the situation now as a form
of torture. That grim experienced woman must be partly right, of course;
Betty was still so young as to defer mechanically to her elders, and
she had no great opinion of herself, of her strength of character or her
judgment. She thought of the boys at home, who had been fond of her.
... She thought of Harold Apgar, over there in Korea. He was clean,
likable, prosperous; and he wanted to marry her. It really would
solve her problems, could she only feel toward him so much as a faint
reflection of the glow that Jonathan Brachey had aroused in her. But
nothing in her nature answered Harold Apgar. For that matter--and this
was the deeply confusing thing--she could not formulate her feeling for
Brachey. She couldn't admit that she loved him. The thought of giving
her life into his keeping--one day, should he come to her with clean
hands; should he ask--was not to be entertained at all. But she couldn't
think of him without excitement; and that excitement, last night and
to-day, was the dominant fact in her life. She had no plans in which he
figured. She was vaguely bent on forgetting him. During the night she
had regretted her promise to meet him once more alone. Yet she had given
that promise. Given the same situation she would--she knew with a touch
of bewilderment that this was so--promise again.
Betty looked appealingly at Mr. Boatwright. Then, meeting with no
sympathy, she drew up her little figure.
“You said he was coming here for tiffin, Mrs. Boatwright?”
“Yes.” The woman glanced out at the courtyard. “Any moment.”
“Then I shan't come into the dining-room.” And Betty turned to leave the
room.
“Just a moment! Am I to take that as an answer? Are you promising?”
Hetty turned; hesitated; then, suddenly, impulsively, came across the
room.
“Mrs. Boatwright,” she said unsteadily--her eyes were filling--“would
it do any good for me to talk right out with you? Probably I do need
advice.” She faltered momentarily, shocked by the expression on that
nearly square face. “Oh, it isn't a terribly serious situation. It
really isn't. But that man is honest. He has led an unhappy, solitary
life...”
Her voice died out.
“But you said he was _married!_” cried Mrs. Boatwright explosively.
“Yes, but--”
“'But! But!' Child, what are you talking about?”
There was nothing in Betty's experience of life that could interpret to
her mind such a point of view as that really held by the woman before
her. She had no means of knowing that they were speaking across a
gulf wider and deeper perhaps than has ever before existed between two
generations; and that each of them, quite unconsciously, was an extreme
example of her type. She turned again.
It was a commotion out at the gate house that arrested her this time.
She felt that curious excitement rising up in her heart and brain. Old
Sun was springing up from the barber's stool, with his always great
dignity brushing that public servitor aside. Then Brachey appeared,
followed by Mr. Boatwright.
The wife of that little man now caught the look on Betty's face, the
sudden light in her eyes, and rose, alarmed, to her feet. Taking in the
situation, she said:
“I shall send something up to your room.”
Betty moved her head wanly in the negative. It was no use explaining to
this woman that she couldn't think of food. She moved slowly toward the
door. She was unexpectedly tired.
“Where are you going?” asked the older woman shortly.
“I've got to be by myself,” said Betty, apparently less resentful now.
It was more a rather faint statement of fact. And she went on out, not
so much as answering Mrs. Boatwright's final “But you will not promise?”
It wasn't even certain that she heard.
3
Mrs. Boatwright stood thinking. Betty had run up the stairs. The two
men were coming slowly across the courtyard, talking. Or her husband
was talking; she could hear his light voice. The other man was silent;
a gloomy figure in knickerbockers. She studied him. Already he was
catalogued in her mind, and permanently. For nothing that might happen
to present Brachey in another light could ever, now, shake her judgment
of him. No new evidence of ability or integrity in the man or of genuine
misfortune in marriage, would influence her. No play of sympathy, no
tolerant reflectiveness, would for a moment occupy her mind. She was a
New Englander, with the old non-conformist British insistence on conduct
and duty bred in her bone. Her emotional nature was almost the granite
of her native lulls. And she was strong as that granite. She feared
nothing, shrank from nothing, that could be classified as duty. No
Latin flexibility ever softened her vigorous expression of independent
thought. Her duty, now, was clear.
She went out into the hall and opened the door.
The two men were just mounting the steps.
“My dear,” began her husband, sensing her mood, glancing up
apprehensively, “this is Mr. Brachey. He--
“Yes,” said she, standing squarely in the doorway, “I understand. Mr.
Brachey, I can not receive you in this house. You, of course, know why.
I must ask you to go at once.”
Then she simply waited; commandingly. From her eyes blazed honest,
invincible anger.
Mr. Boatwright caught his breath; stood motionless, very white; finally
murmured:
“But, my dear, I'm sure you...”
His wife merely glanced at him.
Brachey stood as she had caught him, on the steps, one foot above the
other. His face was expressionless. His eyes fastened on the woman a
gaze that might have meant no more than cold curiosity, growing slowly
into contempt. Then, after a moment, as quietly, he turned and descended
the steps.
Boatwright caught his arm.
“Really, Mr. Brachey--”
“Elmer!” cried his wife shortly. “Let him go!”
But Brachey had already shaken off the detaining hand. He marched
straight across the court, stepped into the gate house, and disappeared.
Betty, all hurt confusion, had lingered in the second floor hall. At the
first sound of Mrs. Boatwright's firm voice, she stepped, her brain a
tangle of little indecisions, to the stair rail.
She ran lightly to the front window and watched Jonathan Brachey as he
walked away. Then she shut herself in her own room, telling herself that
the time had come to think it all out. But she couldn't think.
Against the granite in Mrs. Boatwright Betty, who understood herself not
at all, had to set a quick strong impulsiveness that was certain, given
a little time, to work out in positive act. Very little time indeed now
intervened between impulse and act. She scribbled a note, in pencil:
“Dear Mr. Brachey--I am going out to sketch in the tennis court. You
can reach it by the little side street just beyond our gate house as you
come from the city. Please do come!--Betty D.”
She went down the stairs again, portfolio under arm, and on to the gate
house. Sun, as she had thought, knew at which inn the white gentleman
was stopping, and at Miss Doane's request sent a boy with the chit.